News from the Herd

Will next year be "the year of location aware?"

2009-10-30T07:05:00.007Z

Previously I posted about the truly pitiful click through rates for ads that are seen on the iPhone - 0.3%. Not good news for marketers as the UK's OFCOM (the equivalent of the FCC), found that mobiles, and not the Internet via PCs, is now the second most essential media for 16-24 year olds.

A piece of research by digital map provider NAVTEQ (via Marketing Charts) however is pointing a way forward for brands by trumpeting "The Year of Location Aware." The theory is - serve someone up a random ad on a tiny smartphone screen, or spam them with some SMS marketing and they'll tell you where to go.

However, if the advertising "grabs the attention of a consumer near the point of purchase", according to NAVTEQ's David Klein, the reaction might be different.

Though they clearly have a vested interest in the results, NAVTEQ carried out a study that showed that 72% of consumers found location based ads to be "acceptable" (whatever that means), but 19% who recalled seeing them would click through for info on what's nearby, and that is certainly a whole lot better than 0.3%.

Though location based apps, for example one by UK retailer Tesco that drills down to where you can find what products on which shelves in the supermarket aisle, are taking off, I'm less sure about location based networks - at least here in the UK.

Recently, my fellow digital Cow, Louise pointed me to this article on the limitations of location based social networks despite the hype.

Factors limiting their growth include users being slow to join up, businesses needing better incentives to get on board, the technology being still in its early stages, and - this for most people I've talked to is the deciding factor - a reluctance to be tracked both by brands and by people who you might not want to be seen by.

Indeed, I remember when one of the earlier location based networks, Brightkite, came out, a female Twitter friend of mine in the States joked that this would be the perfect 'stalkers toolkit', hence she was giving it a miss.

Image - Foursquare by dpstyles

Happy birthday banner ad...bet you wish click through rates were still 78%

2009-10-28T06:59:00.003Z

AdAge has a piece showing that the banner ad is now 15 years old, where Frank D'Angelo talks about how his agency, part of Euro RSCG, was the 1st to try out the new medium on Hotwired.com (a then offshoot of Wired).

The first display ads were produced for the likes of AT&T and Volvo. And the click-through rate? A whopping 78%. Good times for advertisers in a medium that was then a real novelty for the small band of web users.

How times have changed. 78% click-through? I now usually use the figure of 0.83%. But it seems if anything I was being generous as a Comscore blog post cites an even lower figure - 0.08%.

The point of the Comscore article by Mike Shaw is to carry on promoting the line 'it's not about clicks, it's about awareness!', and in the post Comscore promises to soon release results for the European market showing how display ads "work over time."

Perhaps. Yet at the same time I'd ask do people even notice that they are there? Less than 1/20 social networkers pay attention to ads and banner blindness is now a huge factor.

However, surely the point is: Instead of tying themselves into knots over metrics and trying to prove, 'hey this online advertising really works!', marketers should concentrate more on doing integrated campaigns online much as they would offline.

For example, another Comscore study has shown that 50% of 'social media exposed' surfers searched for product terms every day, compared to 33% of 'non exposed surfers.'

Just like with an offline campaign, advertising CAN work - if the various market disciplines work online in tandem and there's as much, if not more, emphasis on engaging consumers with conversation and compelling content, as there is in trying to raise 'awareness' via an ad campaign.

Above - the Internet in 1994. Enjoy!

The second most popular word on Twitter? "I"

2009-10-26T21:49:00.004Z

This survey dates from June, but I've included it in case you missed it first time around, as I did.

While preparing for an interview with Rosalie Marshall of V3, I was looking for data to support the fact that a) People tweet about brands - check, 20% of all tweets are brand related. And b) that people's favourite topic of conversation online is themselves. The conclusion being that people are highly likely to relay a personal experience - good or bad - that they've had with your brand.

And here we go, Oxford University Press did a study of 1.5 million tweets. The most common word in a 'tweet'? "The." And the second most popular? "I." By comparison, I is the 10th most popular word in every day language.

According to the people at Oxford University Press, "no doubt this reflects on the intrinsically solipsistic nature of Twitter." No doubt...

Image - Feuillu

What's your iPhone good for? Check out this amazing list

2009-10-26T05:50:00.003Z

Mobile Abilities Map

View more documents from Helge Tennø.

"Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone." (Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer)

Yep, that would be right Steve. In fact, maybe you should check out this awesome presentation by Norwegian digital strategist Helge Tenno about all the things smart phones supposedly can't do.

A really comprehensive list, with plenty of apps I certainly hadn't heard of, I liked Helge's parallel at the end of how the mobile Internet and smart phones is now at the same stage we were at when people ditched ISDN for broadband. Something that ultimately proved to be behaviour changing.

Twitter and bloggers - most see it as complementary

2009-10-26T05:30:00.001Z

The final installment of Technorati's State of the Blogosphere survey from last week looked at the micro-blogging service Twitter. In particular, Technorati wanted to find out what use bloggers make of Twitter, and if they don't use it, why not?

Remember - this is a global survey of bloggers, not the general public. It's people who are at least vaguely familiar with Twitter.

As a result, not surprisingly, 73% of bloggers use Twitter and 27% don't. But for the quarter who don't it's still interesting to see that what I'd call 'Twitter myths' lead the reasons for non-use.

For example, 54% said they didn't feel the need to broadcast their lives (you don't need to), 38% said the content wasn't compelling (you pick and choose who you want to follow), while 35% said they just don't get it.

Among those that do use it, only a quarter (26%) are blogging less, which shows that more often than not the use of Twitter and blogs go hand in hand. Indeed, 69% actively use Twitter to promote their blog. This ties into a theme of previous posts, that Twitter is essentially a bridge to other media.

People listen to what's said and if something breaks, they take it elsewhere.

Update - thanks to Gurukarm for alerting me to my early morning headline fail! (see comments)

Five approaches to social marketing from a Meerkat...and a sixth from Cory Doctorow

2009-10-25T20:44:00.005Z

Amelia Torode's presentation from IPA Social Oct 09

View more presentations from The_IPA.

Anyone in the UK won't need any introduction to 'Aleksandr Orlov', a Meerkat who fronts a campaign for Meerkat comparison site comparethemeerkat.com, with the whole thing actually being in aid of price comparison website comparethemarket.com.

Comparethemeerkat / market is easily one of the UK marketing success stories of the past eighteen months, with a fair amount of online pick-up being key in giving the TV advertising an extra boost.

Via Helge Tenno, comes this presentation from Amelia Torode of the agency behind the campaign, VCCP. Amelia's useful presentation gives five rules of social campaigns: Character counts, have one idea but multiple platforms, give people something to talk about, remember the ears to mouth ratio (ie listen more than you speak), decide where you want to play.

For me number three - give people something to talk about - is the key one here. In fact I was looking for a proof point to knock down the old adage 'content is King' for a presentation today, and came across the following Cory Doctorow quote embedded in this Will Lion image.

Every day you can come across virals, micro-sites, apps or what not that have bombed in terms of the numbers, but are actually really good. The creators have indeed developed compelling content. But they haven't figured out how to make it relevant and how to get people talking about it. In that sense, content isn't King. Implementation, or rather engagement, is.

Toy soldiers

2009-10-25T05:48:00.003Z

Check out this campaign for UNICEF done by Y&R in Jo'burg. The issue of child soldiers being drafted in (or pretty much abducted), in places like Sierra Leone has received a lot of publicity over the past decade, now Y&R turned it into a mailer for corporate sponsors.

When you open up the packet, it looks like a collection of toy soldiers you might have played with yourself as a child. But on closer examination, it's actually a collection of children reading books, riding bikes, playing soccer and so on.

UNICEF had the mailer produced to promote the fact that Africa has the highest number of child soldiers out of any continent, as well as it's work in reintegrating them back into society.

Via 10and5

Half of bloggers will post about brands they love or hate

2009-10-23T07:06:00.004+01:00

Technorati is carrying on with it's annual State of the Blogosphere report, which it has been drip-feeding out over the week. Day four's results look at how some bloggers make money by selling ads, as well as - of more interest - how they feel about brands.

Unsurprisingly 70% talk about brands on their blogs. Really I would have thought that it would be higher as surely it's almost impossible not to mention brands or products in some shape or form in posts, even incidentally.

Less than one in five (18%) bloggers post product reviews at least once a week but at the same time almost half (46%) say that "I blog about brands that I love or hate." This rises to 55% of so-called part-timers, or casual bloggers.

So the lesson from that is that the scope for sending bloggers your stuff with a request for a review might be limited depending on who you target (some do welcome it).

However, there is potential for proactively establishing a relationship with key bloggers in the hope that they might 'love' your brand...as well as making sure that you don't get on the wrong side of them so that you fall into the 'hate' category and end up having your search engine reputation altered by a hostile post...

Most Twitter traffic goes to news, movie sites

2009-10-21T20:23:00.004+01:00

This piece of research from the Chitika network is worth noting. The main destination from Twitter is news websites (28%), followed by movie sites (23%).

This links into something I posted about the other day, that there is pretty much a 3-4 hour news cycle between things breaking online and hitting mainstream media, and that's the window you have to take control of events. That's because Twitter, with a high concentration of bloggers and journalists using it, more often than not acts as a bridge to other media.

According to Chitika, "From being the first to publish pictures of a Turkish Airlines plane crash to the social network's breaking of US Airways Flight 1549's dramatic crash into the Hudson River earlier this year, Twitter's instantaneous and collaborative nature has made it out to be the bleeding edge of all news."

Facebook by comparison, links more to tech and lifestyle sites and less to news - showing that it's 'less real time' and fast moving than Twitter.

Earlier research showed that 20% of tweets are in some shape or form about brands.

So: 20% of tweets about brands + news the biggest destination from Twitter + the four hour online news cycle = a fairly volatile cocktail for any brand caught on the wrong end of the twittersphere.

Via Web Pro News

Newspaper paywalls? 9/10 consumers will give them a miss

2009-10-21T14:49:00.004+01:00

This chart is fairly conclusive: The Wall Street Journal might be doing just fine in charging the suits for news. But here in the UK, other papers in Murdoch's stable such as the tabloid, The Sun, and even The Times have a tough sell ahead of them.

According to MediaWeek, 91% of UK consumers wouldn't pay for news and 90% wouldn't pay for analysis. However, just over one in five would pay for sports content, which does provide news publishers with an area that they might be able to monetise, were the offer good enough.

The fact is, why should most consumers pay for news?

BBC online pretty much supplies everything the casual news consumer might want. And as PwC pointed out in a recent report, we should now be talking about generic news brands as what BBC News and The Times offer online is pretty similar in being primarily articles interspersed with multimedia content.

Which is of course a key reason why both Murdoch senior and junior have been railing against what they see as unfair competition from the public broadcaster.

Via George Hopkin

Getting visual

2009-10-21T06:37:00.002+01:00

The Value of Visual Thinking in Social Business

View more documents from David Armano.

I'm a bit of a charts and visualisation geek...even though my own visualisation skills don't go much further than drawing the equivalent of a stick-man!

US blogger and social media consultant David Armano on the other hand has built his reputation on visual concepts that instantly sell an idea and that have been used again and again.

A good example is the seminal influence ripples diagram demonstrating how in theory even a small time blogger like myself could influence bigger media players, something you still see cropping up in presentations and articles worldwide, despite the fact that it was developed three years ago.

David has now published his slides from Blogworld showing how he got there and giving advice to anyone else wanting to follow suit.

Yet another thing the Internet is good for: It prevents you from losing your marbles

2009-10-20T20:56:00.004+01:00

This is a bit off-topic but it's a fascinating study - the over 55s who go online see improvements in their brain function after just one week.

UCLA researchers presented the findings of a study at the Society for Neuroscience. Two groups of 55-78 year olds were chosen. One with Internet experience and the other without.

The net newbies were told to go online and conduct searches for an hour a day, for a total of seven days over a two-week period and given two different tasks with a brain scan in-between.

The first scan showed brain activity on the regions controlling language, memory and visual abilities. The second one showed "activation of the same areas" as well as seeing their 'inferior frontal gyrus' being stimulated - or in plain English the bits of the brain good for memory and decision making.

Previous research showed that online searches result in more than a 2x increase in brain activation in older adults...so an idea for Sanatogen or the like - do a campaign to get the elderly online (the point is of course, many of them already are)

Via Science Daily Image - HovaHe

The artificial blogger / journalist divide - over a third have worked in traditional media

2009-10-19T21:19:00.004+01:00

Technorati has started publishing its annual State of the Blogosphere report (it drip feeds the stats out over several days). The first set of results, 'who are the bloggers' contains a lot of what you'd expect:

Two-thirds are men (67%), 3/4 college or Uni graduates, and half (48%) are in the US with another quarter (26%) being in the European Union.

This stat however is interesting: The high proportion of bloggers who have also worked in some shape or form for traditional media outlets. Over a third (35%), "have worked within the traditional media as a writer, reporter, producer or on-air personality."

Of those, a quarter (27%) still work in the traditional media (at least part time).

This again shows that the blogger / journalist divide is in some senses artificial. Many newspapers now maintain 'official' blogs for their journalists. Meanwhile other writers use their blogs on an unofficial basis for material that they've been unable to use in the main publication, or to comment on projects they've been working on.

In any case it gives another answer to the question of 'why target bloggers' or why have a blogger outreach programme?

Because as Technorati shows, quite a sizable proportion - around one in ten (27% of the 35%) - are current journalists and can broadcast their thoughts about you via traditional as well as non traditional media. Meanwhile the other quarter have worked in the media in the past and may well do so again.

Save your reputation in 48 hours? You might not even have four

2009-10-17T13:52:00.004+01:00

This piece in yesterday's Financial Times on how crisis management has changed thanks to the 'online onslaught' is worth a read. It goes over various factors, such as how having a few key journalist mates won't work anymore when things spread on Twitter and YouTube.

The article makes the point that you have 48 hours to restore your credibility as after that people generally won't visit your website to get your point of view. Actually you'll be lucky to have that long and three examples here in the UK this week shows how Twitter and online media can set the news agenda and force some major corporate players to change tack within hours.

1 - Blogger Jonathan MacDonald filmed a London Underground staff member abusing an elderly passenger on Thursday. It went viral on Twitter on Friday and by the afternoon was on the front page of the (London) Evening Standard.

Result - the staff member has been suspended.

2 - Yesterday Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir ran a piece on the death of Stephen Gately (of Boyzone), using it to make a comment on gay marriage, saying that 'it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after-myth of civil partnerships' (despite the fact that the coroner ruled he died of natural causes rather than for any "lifestyle" reasons).

Journalism blogger Malcolm Coles among others started asking UK tweeple to tweet to BT, M&S and Visit England asking them to pull their ads from the article...and they did.

3 - Finally, earlier in the week, Twitter played a key part in The Guardian getting around the UK's tough libel laws. The Guardian was prevented from reporting on an environmental scandal involving energy concern Trafigura, despite the fact that it featured in a Parliamentary question.

By the end of the day, after the issue being one of the top trending topics on Twitter, the gagging order was lifted. As the Guardian says, 'A few tweets and freedom of speech is restored.'

All this yet again answers the question of what Twitter is good for. Yes Twitter's 'active' user base is fairly small, with 5% of users accounting for most tweets, which would put the core (as opposed to casual) worldwide audience at around 2.5 million (with around 1.5 million in the States and perhaps 250k in the UK).

But the numbers using it are less important than who is using it. As David Bowen says in the FT, Twitter is a 'connector' that has a short lifespan but high viral power. Your mum or the bloke in the pub probably won't care about it. But journalists and bloggers do - they are on there and listening in.

Video - The London Underground incident as captured by blogger Jonathan MacDonald.

Another day, another survey: Ofcom shows (UK) social media 'surge'

2009-10-16T10:47:00.006+01:00

According to Ofcom, 38% of UK Internet users now have a profile on a social network, up from 22% in 2007.

However when you break these figures down more, that equates to 28% of all adults having a social media presence (based on UK Internet penetration of 73%).

And when you filter out occasional or once only social media users (register an account and leave), 11.5% of all UK adults and 15.5% of Internet users are very active on social networks - my definition of very active being the 41% that log on at least once a day.

In line with previous Ofcom research, TV is the one medium people would miss the most (51%), however this rate drops when you look at 16-24 year olds (39%), and those in the AB socio-economic group (42%).

Coming soon to a virtual world near you - the online dress code

2009-10-14T19:01:00.003+01:00

This is one of those stories that made me go, 'seriously?'

Analyst group Gartner is saying that by 2013, 70% will be extending dress codes to employee's avatars. So forget frolicking around in Second Life or Entropia with next to nothing on, or tooled up with the latest virtual weapons...a short back and sides and a freshly pressed shirt it will be young man!

As James Lundy, managing vice president (?) of Gartner puts it in Personnel Today, "As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, businesses need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the business or the business's reputation."

I think a comment just below the Personnel Today story has got it right, this is a step too far.

Either they represent their company in which case they should have corporate avatars (much like you have corporate Twitter accounts) that indeed tow the corporate line. Or they represent themselves, in which case I'd say they should be able to do what they like in their free time, so long as it is legal etc.

Above - what I'm guessing wouldn't be regulation virtual world office wear (from libraryman via Flickr)

Haven't clicked on an ad recently? Join 84% of other Internet users

2009-10-14T13:51:00.004+01:00

This has been covered elsewhere (for example on Media Post), but it's worth just highlighting. comScore's natural born clickers study shows that from July 2007 to March 2009, the proportion of Internet users that click on ads has halved from 32% to 16%.

It's a US study, though I don't see why things would be any different among UK, Australian et al Internet users.

Given that other stats show a miserable average click-through rate of 0.83%, this seems to point yet again to the hasty demise of the click as a form of measurement. Instead the ad industry is shifting the debate onto showing how, much like TV advertising for instance, it raises awareness.

On that point I'd say the jury is out. To refer back to two other recent studies. On one hand, Internet ads have been shown to be the least influential. On the other hand, if combined with a social media campaign there is evidence that they are successful.

Had a bad experience? Chances are you'll shout about it online

2009-10-13T21:20:00.003+01:00

Brands beware: the social media backlash

View more presentations from Dave Ewart.

Not a huge surprise, but worth noting nonetheless, this Tealeaf study carried out in the UK (via econsultancy), proves that consumers are more and more likely to shout about their bad experiences online.

In particular:

78% share a problem in conducting an online transaction with others
51% have been influenced by social media in their purchases (so few?)
74% are influenced by negative comments they read online
While 52% used a vendor after reading good reviews

In other words, good reviews help, but negative ones certainly carry more weight. The presentation above gives a good run-down of the stats, while the full report is here.

Social media as it happens

2009-10-13T20:28:00.003+01:00

Check out this living social media count by blogger Gary Hayes - really amazing. For once, no further comment needed!

Most Twitter users have less than ten followers

2009-10-12T19:44:00.004+01:00

The other month Sysomos identified that 5% of Twitter users account for the vast majority of activity, which would put Twitter's active user base at around 2.5 million (60% in the US), as opposed to the 50 million odd registered accounts.

This chart that I picked up via Cheap Talk and Michael Nielsen confirms this - 75% of users have less than ten followers and I'd argue that Twitter first really becomes useful when you have 20-50 followers upwards.

Interestingly enough, the break through appears to happen in week two. If someone is still tweeting in their second week, it's more likely than not that they will hang around.

That two week incubation period seems to be the thing for Twitter to zero in on if they want to bring down the high rate of churn - something that needs to happen before it really does meet its stated aim of becoming "the pulse of the planet."

Print declining in influence but not dead yet while TV still reigns surpreme

2009-10-10T20:40:00.002+01:00

A fascinating study carried out by TargetCast in the US confirms that print media is on the way out, but that the day of reckoning might be some way away yet.

Just over 50% of consumers aged 18-24 agreed that they'd rather get their news online. However for 25-64 year olds (ie most of us), the figures was more like 30%....in other words more than two-thirds of the over 25s would still prefer to get their news the old fashioned way (whether they actually do so is of course a different matter).

However when asked 'which medium is not as relevant today?', the scores among all adults for newspapers were 42% to 30% agree / disagree (+12%), and 17% to 55% (-38%) for TV.

This chimes in with study after study that I've seen in both the US and the UK showing that TV still rules supreme in consumers' lives. For example here in the UK, TV is the most essential medium for all age groups according to an OFCOM study.

In fact another question asked by TargetCast reinforces this point even further. Just under one in ten (9%) consumers used newspapers more while 33% used it less - quite a high figure if you translate it into newspaper circulations. Yet looking at TV, 19% said they watch more and only 13% said that they watch less.

Finally, in the week that the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK found online ad spend overtaking TV for the first time, comes more news confirming that online ads are the least effective. The Internet ranked last out of newspapers, TV, magazines and radio when consumers were asked whether they paid attention to ads (newspapers came 1st), confirming a high degree of banner blindness.

However when asked about ads influencing purchases, online performed slightly better, with radio taking last place. This ties into another study by Comscore showing that so long as a brand is talked about on social networks, search advertising for one can be reasonably effective.

The full report is available as a PDF here, via marketing charts.

Better not buy green - you'll turn into some kind of moral deviant

2009-10-09T20:54:00.004+01:00

Or so says a study by The University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Well ok, not exactly. But what the study, conducted by academics Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, does say is that while being around green products will make us more altruistic, buying them can set up "moral credentials in people's minds."

In other words, by using Ecover, we think we've got some moral credits in the bank and so slack off in other areas.

Three experiments were carried out. The first found that green consumers are perceived to be generally more cooperative and ethical. The second showed that merely being exposed to products from a green store made consumers share more money with others than the norm...but people who bought products shared less.

In the third experiment, consumers who bought stuff from the green store showed a higher than average incidence of lying and cheating in a lab game.

What does this prove? That perhaps buying green products is seen as a bit of a sacrifice in terms of quality and effectiveness, so once you've been seen to have 'done your bit', you can morally relax a bit (it would have been interesting to look at other ethical products like Fair Trade).

Or, according to the researchers in their conclusion, "While mere exposure to green products can have a positive societal effect by inducing pro-social and ethical acts, purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors."

It's an interesting point though, whether you could take the first part of that experiment - where people acted more ethically after exposure towards (but not purchase of) green products - and use it to alter and influence behaviour.

Could charity shops for example, surround themselves with ethical stuff to make people give more? Could political figures even create ethical 'mood music' when asking the rest of us to make recession based sacrifices?

Image - Bob the Lomond

Via Science Daily

Facebook almost at 100 million users in Europe

2009-10-09T00:27:00.001+01:00

When you are in an agency pitch it's almost impossible not to use the 'f' word - Facebook. It almost makes my heart sink as it can seem like ticking the 'and then there's Facebook' box, when you know there are more creative routes of getting the message out online.

But this chart shows why it is unavoidable and it all comes down to the numbers.

Facebook is the only truly pan-European social network, with user numbers (according to Inside Facebook) having reached almost 100 million by the end of September.

Indeed, if you are planning an online marketing campaign that works across the continent it's key, with separate Comscore stats (from April 09) showing that Facebook is the market leader in 11/17 European markets - notable exceptions being Germany, the Netherlands and Russia, with Facebook's market share still being relatively low in the latter.

As before the top Facebook country remains the UK, though the network is becoming ever more popular in Turkey, with 1+ million users having been added in September alone.

The results are clear: Social media chatter drives brand searches

2009-10-08T06:20:00.009+01:00

Despite various stats that cast doubts on the effectiveness of online advertising in general, the one area that is generally held to be a success is paid for search. New research by Comscore and GroupM (via Marketing Charts) now shows that if consumers have had exposure to brands via social media, they are more likely to be receptive to search terms related to brands.

Comscore's results show that consumers that use social media are 1.7x as likely to search with the intention of sifting through a list of brands or products to check out, compared to other web users. Meanwhile 50% of ''social media exposed" surfers searched for product terms every day, compared to 33% of "non exposed surfers."

In all, people exposed to "influenced social" and paid search has 223% heavier search behaviour.

Two stats to throw against that. First of all, Comscore didn't specify whether brand social media engagement was restricted to advertising. I assume not, especially given the statistic that social network ads fail to engage 96% of users.

But on a wider note, it does again show that brand conversation (as opposed to advertising) on social networks works. 20% of tweets are about brands, and Twitter users in general are more likely to talk about brands and click on ads.

A lost generation of newspaper readers? Not necessarily

2009-10-06T06:41:00.007+01:00

Not everyone is a fan of the French interventionist model of doing things, but an experiment in France shows that it's not inevitable that newspapers will soon be met with a lost generation of readers who no longer consume their news in print.

According to a report at the recent World Association of Newspapers conference on Young Readers (via Paul Bradshaw), the French are getting 18-24 year olds into the habit of reading newspapers by giving subscriptions away to them free, once a week.

Jeanne-Emmannuelle Hutin of the Presidential Youth Commission said that there was clearly a lot of debate around the issue, but that her newspaper, Ouest France, had actually been trialling the concept since 2006 and it had been a success.

Ouest France had succeeded in upping the number of 18-24 year old readers by 22,000, and though only 12% had resubscribed once the freebie had expired (though that's arguably 12% more than would otherwise had been the case), 65% did still read the paper once a week.

However, the lesson from France is that it couldn't be a case of same old, same old. Special content (for example a jobs section aimed at that market) was produced on the day free subscriptions were distributed, and a 'new media' marketing campaign was developed...under the theory that if you want younger consumers to do their reading offline, you need to find them online.

It's an interesting experiment, and to move younger consumers onto reading in print (whatever the merits of coaxing them to do so) something radical has to be done.

For example, here in the UK I tend to recycle this chart quite a lot (click on image for a larger size). It's from the most recent communications markets report from Ofcom. Ofcom asked consumers what one media they considered 'essential.' Newspapers scored 2% among 16-24 year olds and 4% for adults as a whole (TV was most important across the board).

As an aside, among 16-24 year olds, mobile phones is the second most essential form of media, while for 25-34 year olds it's the Internet via the good old PC or laptop.